Discipline: Literature – poetry

Laurence O’Dwyer

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: IRELAND
MacDowell Fellowships: 2017

Laurence O’Dwyer is a graduate of University College Cork and holds a Ph.D. in paradigms of memory formation from Trinity College Dublin. His first collection of poetry, Tractography (Templar, 2018) received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. In 2019, he was awarded a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation (US) and a writer-in-residence position with RaumArs (Finland). In 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. His current project, The Lighthouse Journal, is an exploration of an Arctic environment in poetry and prose and stems from time spent working on a lighthouse in northern Norway. Poems from The Lighthouse Journal have received the Yeovil Prize (UK) (2018) and The Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Prize (Ireland) (2019). The Lighthouse Journal is supported by grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, the Ireland Chair of Poetry, the Society of Authors (UK) and the Authors’ Foundation (UK).

O’Dwyer edited and extended a poetry manuscript entitled Tractography during his time at MacDowell. Tractography was published in 2018 by Templar Poetry (UK). A selection of poems from this manuscript received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 2016. He also worked on a book of poetry and prose about a journey from Litløy Fyr (Little Island Lighthouse) in Norway to the principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees.

Studios

Veltin

Laurence O’Dwyer worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

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